In this recording, we're going to use The Geography Visualiser to identify some features of different landscapes that we can find in North and South America. Now, if you've not used The Geography Visualiser before, there's some important little tips that we can use to help us move the map around and to zoom in and out. So to move the map around, or pan the map as we call it, what we can do is we can hold the left button down of our mouse and then we can drag the map, so we've got what we want in the middle of the screen. So in this case we've got North and South America now in the middle of the screen. To zoom in and out, I can either use the scroll wheel of my mouse, so that's the middle wheel between the two buttons. And I can zoom in by rolling it forwards and zoom out by rolling it backwards. Or I can use these buttons here where it says zoom in, the little plus button, and the minus button, which is zoom out. Either of those will work. Now at the moment, what we have on the screen is a satellite image of the world, but on top of that we've also got the borders of the countries and the names of some countries and some key cities. And we call this map an imagery hybrid map. So it's kind of a mix between a satellite image and some information that they put on the map to show us where the countries are. And this is a type of base map. A base map is a background map on a GIS, a geographic information system. Now if you look at the bottom toolbar on the left-hand side, I can click on base maps, and I can choose from lots of different base maps. But for now, actually imagery hybrid is good for our purposes. So what I would like to do is I would like to choose four places in North and South America, in different parts of North and South America, maybe equal distances apart. And we want to investigate them. We want to find out what it's like, maybe, what could we expect there? What plants would we expect there? What wildlife would we expect there? We want to find that sort of information now. So the first thing I've got to do is choose where I'm going to investigate. So to do this, I'm going to go to the bottom toolbar and I'm going to click on Sketch. And when you click on Sketch, a popup menu will come up, and we can click on one of these symbols. And what that means, I can now put these symbols where I like on the map. And I'm going to choose four places that we can then investigate roughly equal distances apart. So I'm going to start right in the north, so I'm going to click here. You can choose somewhere else if you like. But I've chosen here, which actually is in Alaska, which is a state in the United States, which is quite strange because it's not linked to the rest of the United States. I'm then going to come down, I'm going to choose somewhere that looks quite different, and I can tell it looks quite different by just looking at the satellite picture and seeing that it just looks different. It's a different color. So I'm going to click somewhere on the United States-Mexico border just here. And again, I'm going to then move the map down by holding the left button down and dragging it. I'm going to choose somewhere, again, quite different. I can see that that's in Brazil. And I'm gonna go right to the south of South America, and I'm going to click on a fourth one. So I've now got four different points on the map that I can now investigate. I'm now going to close this popup menu because I don't need any more symbols on my map. And what I would like to do is I would like to know what sort of biomes these four places are. Now, a biome is like a huge ecosystem where the plants and the animals and the climate is quite similar over that area. So to find that information out, I need to add what we call a layer of data. So what that means on a GIS is we've collected the information over geographical space and then we've turned it into a map. And I can add this layer of information by adding a layer at the bottom. So if I click on this add layer on the bottom toolbar, I'm going to scroll down, I'm just using the scroll wheel of my mouse, but I can use this handle on the right-hand side. And what I'm looking for is this bottom one where it says World Biomes - Elementary. So where it says add, there's a little plus button, I can add that. And you'll see on this bottom toolbar now, that it now says two, and that means there's two layers on the map. One layer is just the little symbols I've put on. But the other layer is this information about where the world biomes are. I'm going to close this down now. This is a choropleth map, which means we use colors to show information. Now at the moment, we might not know what all these colors mean, but if I click on legend, it tells me what they mean. So the orange areas are desert, this light green is grassland, this light blue is lake. I can even click on an area, and it will tell me what this biome is. So it says this biome is tiger, which is like boreal forest, coniferous forest. Now you may have noticed that our points, our symbols, have disappeared. So there's a little trick to help us here to see them again. If I click on map layers, I need to move this sketch, which is our symbols back up to the top because that will bring it to the top of the display. So if I bring this to the top, you can see they all come back again, and I can see where my points are. So I can zoom into this area, and I can click on this area where my point is, and it tells me the biome. So this is tundra, which has a cold climate, frozen soils, and it's treeless. So we'd expect quite a blank area, but we can look at what that might look like later. But we know that this is tundra. I can scroll down and look at my next place, and I can click on it. And it tells me this biome is desert. This orange area is desert. So I think we might know what that means. It's going to be a hot desert. So I would expect not much vegetation. I would expect it to be quite sandy. I can scroll down, I can click on this. And it tells me it's tropical rainforest. And I'm gonna go all the way to the bottom. I've clicked in this area here. And actually, if you look at this, it's kind of separate to everything else. It says this biome is rock and ice. So we'll have to have a look at what that might look like later on. So we've used a layer of information, a layer of data to tell us about the biomes of our four different location. So we're able to start finding things out about these places and investigating the characteristics of these different landscapes.